I hate being right all the time.

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Jeff Goldblum, there, in Jurassic Park, highlighting his forecast consequences of f***ing with Mother Nature.

For me, this only applies to movies and TV. I haven’t been right about anything else since at least 2016. I’m married for a start (joke there for the unreconstructed privileged white males at the back. Boom. Boom.) Most of the time I wander around in a kind of dazed, middle-aged ennui, vaguely wondering if I should get my hormone levels checked. Currently, that weary torpor is accompanied by the score to The Batman, which has lodged itself in my skull as firmly as Pancake Day syrup sticks to … well, everything. Great music; not particularly helpful with reasoning.

Films are a different matter. The Goldblum quote has become an oft-used cliché in our house, whether it’s spotting the culprit in a mystery, predicting the eventual method of dispatch of the villain, or quoting dialogue before it’s spoken aloud. Frankly, it’s bloody annoying. Not just for everyone else in the room, but for me. Especially for me. Thanks, Kylie.

Because this isn’t some useless superpower, some preternatural film geek ability. It’s just another in the lengthy list of iniquities of ageing.

Things falling off. Male pattern baldness (pray tell, is there a female pattern?). Dodgy hips. Knees and shoulders with the robustness of an out-of-date packet of Quavers. Tinnitus (what?). Unflushable belly fat. Myopia. Completely random aches and pains. An increasing inability to bend over. Headaches. Falling asleep within eight seconds of finding something interesting to read, accompanied by a total inability to fall asleep when I actually want to.

And then there’s the … um … memory. I can probably still quote the script of Aliens verbatim. I can tell you some obscure point of law from my degree, which is completely useless in my daily life. I can recite most of the incomprehensible rules of Budge-It, the game we played at primary school (basically musical chairs with ultraviolence). I can recall with stunning exactitude the way to complete some video or board game that hasn’t existed since the late Eighties. But I still can’t remember why I came into this room. All I know is, it wasn’t to write a blog… I’m only doing this until I remember the original reason.

Tea is the worst. I always know, without fail, whether I have finished a cup of tea or not. That might sound trivial, but believe me, when it’s accompanied by an inability to remember where the tea is, it becomes wholly relevant. And it must be that cup, too. A new one simply won’t do. Anybody who relates to this knows the experience of feeling like a crap Indiana Jones on a sacred quest for that hallowed object, especially when you look in the microwave for the third f**king time and it’s still not there. Come, oh heavy boulder and end this thirsty suffering.

To this, I can now add the irritation of predicting the outcome of movies, because I’ve seen so many that the rhythms, the casting, the musical cues, the camera moves … it’s a code that my veteran brain decodes in moments.

Sometimes it can ruin the whole thing, like a casting choice in the 2011 version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which made the entire mystery defunct. Sometimes, great filmmakers exploit it, like Denis Villeneuve in Arrival, reducing you to a blubbering wreck as everything clicks into place and like the protagonist, you glimpse the future.

It’s Villeneuve’s Dune that brought this into focus, as well as a little Netflix movie on the extreme opposite end of the budget scale.

I watched Dune on a beautifully presented 4k disc. Great film. Faithful to the book. Can’t wait for part two. Thing is, whether you’ve read the book or not, you know the story inside out. Dune is to Science Fiction what Latin is to language. It underpins and weaves through every SF or fantasy story. It’s been as mercilessly harvested for other films as the Harkonnens harvest Spice from Arrakis. I don’t believe there’s a single beat of that story you couldn’t predict.

So it was with Till Death. Not, as the title might suggest, a story of great retail tragedy, but a fun 90-minute thriller. The predictability of this one is off the chart (admittedly not helped by Netflix’s content warning, but even so).

Did this predictability stop me from enjoying either? Not at all. If anything, in the latter case it helped. It was so abundantly obvious that a chap who couldn’t act wasn’t going to survive the first act, I could relax and let him get on with it.

It’s become clichéd to say there’s only a limited number of stories or to talk about Campbell’s hero’s journey, which Dune exemplifies. It doesn’t add much anymore, save to say the writers of the recent Star Wars sequels missed an obvious chance to portray a more interesting villain’s journey.

It’s often worse when writers try to shoehorn in a twist for the sake of it. It can leave logic behind. Not to mention the fact that twisty movies are a nightmare to review since any passing mention of one existing is obviously a spoiler itself.

Spoilers have so much currency now. Understandable in the information age. Spoilers used to be intentional. Now they are far easier to stub your toe against in the dark. Often, they’re a sign of weaker storytelling. Overreliance on ‘WTF?’ moments show a lack of substance.

The other thing about truly spoiler worthy moments – you know the kind of thing, sledges, or the identity of a key character – is that they tend to be gamified. It’s an achievement to be the one who figures out who Keyser Soze is before anyone else, but that’s because the story is full of ‘of course!’ type clues that reward attention, and, more importantly, a rewatch.

I used to crave being first. Films were always a communal experience. Home viewing would often be a race to outdo each other in spotting twists or key plot points.

I care a lot less about that these days. I just want to be transported. Sometimes the inherent predictability of something like Till Death is exactly what my elderly, addled brain needs, especially when Vlad the Inaner is swaggering around threatening to get his nukes out.

That’s the thing about that quote from Jurassic Park. It’s a warning delivered as a joke. A warning that just because you can do something, you should stop to think whether you should. Anyone who pays the slightest attention to current affairs and has an IQ north of 100 is wishing they weren’t right too. These events really should surprise no one. The likely future course of history is… troubling.

Next to that, I’m grateful for the escapism that film provides, even if surprise is increasingly rare. It also gives more meaning to this blog, to seek challenge, to view wider, but to keep it accessible. I may codify that as a goal at some point, I have some ideas.

The readers I do have are loyal, so if you have views of where you’d like Geek Graffiti to go, then I’d like to hear them. It’s an experiment. It’s paid for until 2024. Let me know what you want to see.

In the meantime, Till Death is worth a look if you fancy a quick, effective thriller. It’s a Megan Fox vehicle, but good despite that. Transformers this is not. Dune is also great, of course.

More reviews are to come soon. The final series of The Last Kingdom starts on Netflix this week, so if you fancy some heroic Saxon vs Viking violence and politics, then jump in. There’s a possible follow up to my review of The Batman coming on Live for Films and some possible changes to this site, all of which are work and demand dependent.

Finally, if any of you know why I walked into this room in the first place, I’d be grateful…